Revolut is currently sending as many as 80 suspicious activity reports a day to An Garda Síochána, according to the neobank’s country manager for Ireland.
Speaking to the Oireachtas finance committee on Wednesday, Malcolm Craig said that the company, which has more than three million users in the Republic, is now sending between 50-80 such reports on average to the gardaí.
Financial organisations are legally obliged by Irish law to file such reports flagging potential money laundering, terrorist financing, or other financial crimes, to the gardaí.
Mr Craig said that the group’s fraud-protection warnings to customers on its app prevented €49 million of fraud in Ireland last year.
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Criticised by members of the Oireachtas committee for Revolut’s perceived low rate of reimbursement to victims of fraud, the group’s head of financial crime compliance, Eamonn Howard, insisted that it takes a case-by-case approach and that its main focus is on investing in systems to prevent crime.
The Central Bank reported in October that €160 million in fraudulent payments were recorded by Irish resident payment service providers (PSPs) in 2024, up 24.5 per cent on the year. The Revolut executives said that their group recorded 8 per cent of the total.
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While a number of members – including Sinn Féin’s finance spokesman Pearse Doherty and his Labour Party counterpart Ged Nash – said during the meeting that Revolut has shaken up the payments landscape, they also denounced its customer service.
However, Mr Craig repeatedly referred to comments from Central Bank officials to the committee last month that there was no material difference between banks and neobanks in the levels of customer complaints made to authorities.
On December 3rd, deputy Central Bank governor Colm Kincaid told the committee: “We do not actually see a particularly different scale, number or profile of the complaints coming into any one of the banking firms we are talking about. The scale and the nature do not vary that much, actually.”
Still, he said that there “is significantly more that all regulated institutions, whether they are providing services digitally or otherwise, need to do on customer service”.
“Customer service is absolutely critical to us,” said Mr Craig. “We are continually monitoring and continually investing in it.”
Less than 5 per cent of Revolut’s users in Ireland use the company for their primary banking account, Mr Craig said. However, the figure is growing, he added.
“For Ireland, 85 per cent of customers use our app on a monthly basis,” he said.
Executives from Revolut told The Irish Times last April that they were planning for an Irish launch of mortgages in the fourth quarter of 2025.
However, this has drifted as the group is continuing to focus, for now, on the Lithuanian market, home of its existing euro zone banking licence, where it unveiled its first mortgage product in May.
Mr Craig could not tell the committee members when there will be a launch in Ireland.
“We have a team in Dublin working on a local mortgage product,” he said. “We will release it when it is fully ready and spot on for the Irish market. I cannot give you a date.”
He confirmed that Revolut plans to offer home loans directly to customers, rather than use brokers, and that the initial focus will be on the mortgage switcher and refinancing market.
Revolut’s loan rate in Lithuania is linked to a key European benchmark – the so-called Euribor rate at which banks are willing to lend to each other in the euro zone.
Avant Money launched a similar product in the Irish market last year. It has echoes of the European Central Bank (ECB) tracker mortgages that were prevalent in the Republic before the financial crisis. Lenders stopped offering these in 2008, when their own borrowing costs spiralled and lost any correlation with ECB rates.
